Abstract/Summary

The Turing Test, originally configured for a human to distinguish between an unseen man and unseen woman through a text-based conversational measure of gender, is the ultimate test for thinking. So conceived Alan Turing when he replaced the woman with a machine. His assertion, that once a machine deceived a human judge into believing that they were the human, then that machine should be attributed with intelligence. But is the Turing Test nothing more than a mindless game? We present results from recent Loebner Prizes, a platform for the Turing Test, and find that machines in the contest appear conversationally worse rather than better, from 2004 to 2006, showing a downward trend in highest scores awarded to them by human judges. Thus the machines are not thinking in the same way as a human intelligent entity would.

This research was first presented at the
European Conference on Computing and Philosophy, Enschede, June, 2007;
and forms part of a chapter in
Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-354-8.ch017